Path to Junon

Finally, with his gil in hand and many Materia 'shards' less, Edward turned to face the weapons and armors shop, going to the counter across from the Materia shop as he looked at some of them. It was obvious the weapons were quite well-made, but the prices seemed like child's play, like they were too cheap to be real. Either way, the thing drawing his attention the most was how they had slots on them for orbs the size of Materia, and when he looked at the bracers (he refused to call them bracelets), they showed similar slots as well. Looking closely, he could see how the better quality option of the two bracers had what looked like two slots with a bar between them in what he guessed was the phenomenon of 'linking' the Final Attack Materia would need. The best quality of each weapon type also had two slots linked similarly with an extra, single slot by itself for a total of three.

Looking up at the weapons shop owner, the teen asked him, "What do you think I should have, or will need, to get to Junon? Will I need a coat, a weapon, or so on?"

Blinking, the man gave him a wryly amused grin and said, "It's not cold between here and there, but you'll probably want a tent and some potions for the trip, even if you have a Restore Materia on you. As for the other, if you had a bit of a tough time getting here, any weapons or armor would help you out going further, since the monsters only get tougher the further west you go. Of course, now that you have more Materia, you'll be able to use it a lot more efficiently with some gear with slots, and you don't actually have any slotted gear right now or I'm sure you'd have been using it."

He now knew there would be monsters to fight (and that they were called monsters, not animals), so figured he should take the advice to prepared, especially with the library looking more and more appealing the more he found out about this place. Getting to Junon would be something he'd have to do, and because of the dead zone around the Reactor, he couldn't rely on his alchemy to get him through. On the other hand, Materia seemed to be useable in the dead zones, so it would be beneficial if he could use it—assuming he'd be able to without experiencing information overload. The big question was whether or not he'd react to the slotted gear like other people in this area, or if he'd still get information overload, so he had to test that, first and foremost.

But geez, where in the world was he, that they could speak the same language but everything be so different, like these 'Materia'?

With a contemplative expression and nod, Ed pointed at a bracer called a Mythril Armlet and asked, "Mind if I try that on?"

The shopkeeper took it out of the case and held it out to him, instructing as he did, "Use the leather strap to adjust the size and see if it'll tighten enough for your bare wrist."

Taking the Armlet, the boy followed the instructions, pulling his left glove off to try it on his now bare wrist, and since it fit amazingly well, he took it off, pulled his right glove off, and tried it on the right as well. It seemed the bracers were decidedly adaptable, so he slipped his left glove back on to put his Restore in one of the slots. The result was a controlled flow of information which allowed him to dictate how much data he would get at any one time, from the complete data to as little as the Materia's name. It also seemed that putting Materia in a slot caused odd shifts in his base strength and magic levels—though the effect also seemed somehow incomplete or not properly registering, like it was trying to take effect but something was locking both the diminishing factors and the boosts out. While the result was both satisfactory and beneficial, it still left him with even more questions he now wanted answers to.

Keeping the Armlet on, he asked, "So, can I wear two of these bracers as well as having two or three weapons to use? Also, where will I find bracers and weapons with more slots?" As he spoke, he pulled out the Heal Materia and slid it into the other slot on the Armlet, getting the same results—or lack thereof.

"Well, I don't know all the details, but there's better gear in both Junon and Costa del Sol, which is a vacation and tourist spot near a pretty dangerous wilderness. Ships travel between Junon and Costa del Sol very often, daily at least. The best stuff is either things you find as a treasure hunter, made by the blacksmith near Gongaga, or made in Midgar—of course, that's up on the Plate, where the very wealthy live. As for two bracers, that's up to you, and the weapons are up to you as well, though they won't do you any good if you can't use them or they cripple you."

"I can use any weapon put in my hands."

"That's not what I meant—you'd have to be a fool to use a weapon you didn't know how to fight with. What I meant is that having a buster sword and a lance is useless because carrying one and using the other would be a huge strain and very hard to do, and you sure can't use both at once. Also, because of the reductions in strength, stamina, and defense Materia tend to cause, if you put so many Materia on, you may not be able to protect yourself even if you have strong Materia slotted." While he liked spears, there weren't any available in this town, and his weapons skills were varied enough for him to use any weapon very well. He'd adapt, especially with the way it looked like the Materia were functioning.

"Oh...Well, they're both my look-out, right? I know I won't slot more Materia than I can actually support and maintain decent physical ability with. Anyway, in the case of weapons, I was thinking of a sword and glove. I'm just not sure I can afford two weapons and two bracers, items like a tent, and food and a stay at the inn..."

The shopkeeper looked amused as he said, "The local inn is only twenty gil, and it's only thirty in Junon, both of which include any meals you happen to be there for during the day. If you go as far as the ship to Costa del Sol, the ticket is fifty gil each way. A tent is five hundred and each potion is fifty, so the cost of those depends on how many you buy. None of those are a big expense, and anytime you upgrade gear, you'll get some back from the sales of your old gear. Mythril Armlets are three hundred and fifty gil, or two for seven hundred, the Mythril Claw is seven hundred and fifty, and the sword...Were you looking at the Mythril Saber or the Mythril Rapier (1)?"

"Rapier," the boy said immediately, knowing he wasn't going to use a sword bigger than him—ever. And the Saber was bigger than him.

"So another nine hundred gil, for a total of twenty three hundred and fifty—you still have almost seven thousand left."

"Oooh...Yeah, I guess if things like inns are so cheap here, I have plenty for what I need. Okay, let's go with the two Armlets, the Rapier, and the Claw."

Ed looked at the bills he'd gotten from the Materia sales and picked three of the thousand gil bills to give the weapons shopkeeper so he could break one of them. He was given back a five hundred, a one hundred, and a fifty, along with a second Mythril Armlet, a Mythril Rapier, and a Mythril Claw. Taking off his left glove again, he fastened the new Armlet onto it, then pulled the Claw gloves on—they were full gloves with four casings across the back of the hand where blades would slide free if he wanted to fight with them, so with the blades retracted into their casings, they may as well have been a regular pair of gloves. On a whim, he put Final Attack on the second Armlet, and attached Enemy Skill, Poison, and Earth to the slots on the Claw. Finally, he strapped the Rapier on at his waist and pulled it far enough from its sheath to put Fire, Ice, and Lightning in the slots on it. The bills he had left over from his sales as well as his change all went in the small change pouch in his bag, and his transmuted gloves he put in the keepers section, just in case.

"Thanks for your help!" the boy said cheerfully to both shopkeepers as he gave them a wave and left.

On his way out, he heard them both reply with a bemused, "Have a nice day!"

Finding his way back to the items shop, he took a look around at the items there and found it was true—a surprisingly compact tent was only five hundred gil, and if he got ten potions, he'd make an even thousand in purchases there. Since that would make things easy, he was about to say he'd get them when he figured he should ask the items shopkeeper something he hadn't considered until he noted things like poison antidotes and eye drops in the shop.

"Do the monsters between here and Junon use anything I'll need to actually fix myself, like poison?" he asked the woman.

"The only thing I know about is darkness, which you use the eye drops to fix, but any of the effects a monster can cause on humans only lasts until they die. If you can fight effectively with your eyes closed, I'd say don't worry about it, and none of the other monsters in this area use any effects, regardless. If you were heading north through the Mythril Mine and into the Kalm and Midgar areas, some of the monsters would use poison, sadness, or fury. Sadness and fury stay with you unless you head into town to get some care at the inn or doctor's, or you'd have to use a hyper or tranquilizer, but if you're heading to Junon, there's nothing to worry about," she explained. "Of course, you aren't likely to encounter many monsters if you go straight to Junon. Normally, if you leave here right after breakfast, you'll make Junon by noon the next day."

"Okay, then I'll make it easy and get a tent and ten potions. Thanks for your advice, and here's the gil for my stuff," he grinned, handing her a thousand gil bill. After all, he knew he could fight just fine blind (though not perfectly), and that was only if a monster happened to use the effect on him.

She quickly packed up the items for him, and he headed for the inn, where twenty gil was indeed enough to stay there overnight, and to get his evening and morning meals. The inn also provided travel food which was pretty cheap as well—each meal was five gil, so if he got four meals' worth, it would come to twenty gil. Since both the food and the room were simple but decent quality, it was no trial to pay for a night and some travel food, which he bought right away and put in his bag, knowing he'd be heading out pretty early in the morning and travel food was such because it wouldn't go bad easily from sitting out for several days.

By the time he was done and eating his meal in the inn's main room, he was flipping discreetly through his bills under the table, seeing five thousands, a five hundred, three hundreds, three tens—and he still had five coins left over. Fifty-eight hundred and thirty-five was still quite a bit to work with, but he had enough sense to know he'd need to start looking at ways he could make an income, probably while he was in Junon. While collecting and selling Materia was lucrative, it wasn't anything like reliable, and his only benefit right at that moment was the convenience of him waking up at the 'windfall' with enough spare time to figure things out and collect it all before someone else came along and took it. In Junon, he was likely to be able to find out what kinds of jobs he could do to make a steady income, so that was yet another reason to go there.

As he put his money away, he paused when he heard a disturbed traveler talking to the innkeeper in hushed tones, both of them looking concerned. Apparently, there was a bandit going around outside Junon, attacking, robbing, and often killing people. He had been for months and no one had been able to stop him, as the traveler said some of the local infantry and several mercenaries had tried—and all of them had wound up dead, save one lucky trooper who had been knocked out. In other words, he should be careful near Junon, since the idiot bandit may try going after him as a solo traveler.

Not long after, he went to his small room and settled in for a good rest, still puzzling over where he was and how he'd gotten there, along with all the oddities encompassed in his change of location. Most of his thoughts outside that were taken up with Al and Winry and everyone else in Amestris, and he again wondered exactly what had happened with Truth that Al wasn't with him—had it not worked? Had it worked and he was paying the price for it? But then, what was the purpose of him being ditched in some random location if it was—well, either of those options? And why couldn't he remember what had happened after he had transmuted 'Father', which he knew would have sent him to the Alchemist's Gate?

He woke fairly early in the morning, but breakfast was already being served, so he ate quickly and set out, heading mostly west and only slightly north. By how short a time it would take him to walk it without even a road to follow, it was pretty safe to say both that the cities weren't very far apart and the land mass wasn't very large. As far as walking and all the talk of monsters went, the largest part of his trip was completely uneventful, which gave him time to examine his surroundings and have his meals in peace. Unfortunately, there wasn't all that much scenery to see, and almost all he was walking through was a wide open grassland with a few patches of forest and mountains in the distance to the north—a direction he definitely wasn't going in.

His first encounter was with three green, lizard-like things which jumped out of the grass at him and stood to about his chest at the shoulder, but they were skinny and quite weak. After all, it only took him a minute to effectively behead all three with a couple quick twists and spins, and that was with just the blades on his Claws. What puzzled him was their appearance, since he'd never seen anything like them before. He had to wonder if they were chimeras or natural—monsters. Then again, people talked about them the way his own people talked about wolves and mountain lions, like they were usually not present, infrequently nuisances, and rarely became deadly. It was possible they were natural and had always just been part of these people's lives.

In a small patch of woods on his way, he encountered a pair of vivid purple birds which were toast with one strike of a Bolt spell each—the first time besides the use of the Restore when he'd actually used his new Materia. Not that he needed to in the area he was in because he could have used alchemy, but he was no fool; he already knew how to use alchemy, and it was the Materia he had to become proficient with in order to be effective in any other dead zones he came across. As such, learning to tap the orb and activate it was his highest priority currently, and while he wasn't finding it hard given how it was essentially a branch of alchemy, using it in battle required adaptation.

Fire was the next Materia he tested, when four walking plant-seed things which defied logical explanation attacked him back out on the grassland nearing the time he'd been thinking of stopping for supper. The fire took out the one he'd targeted, and he drew his sword to slice another of them in half, then quickly shot off another Fire as the last of the creatures shot some kind of spark explosion at him. Dodging that attack, Ed quickly stabbed it with the rapier, and followed up with a deep slash from the Claw on his free hand, killing it. Taking a deep breath, then deciding here and now was as good a place as any to stop and eat (and rest), he sat down on the grass nearby and stared at the strange, vine-like head fixtures of one of them while he ate.

Half an hour later, he was still sitting there, resting after the battle—using the energy Materia tapped into was tiring, like flexing a new muscle—when he noticed some kind of glow floating around the bodies of the monsters. Blinking, he frowned and muttered, "What the...?" as he got up and moved over to look more closely at what was going on. At first, he'd thought the light was being caused by a type of firefly, but it wasn't anything so tangible. Rather, bits of the monsters seemed to be breaking off them and floating around until they either settled on something and vanished or hovered in the air for long enough, at which point, they would vanish. He was very sure they were vanishing, not 'going out', because whatever was creating the glow was either nothing more than energy to start with, or there was nothing being left behind, say, if he caught a floating light in his hand. Whatever the gentle, green-white light was, it was eating away at the monsters steadily, and he really had no clue what to think of that.

Moving on, he found a good place to camp for the night, and got a good rest which was undisturbed by monsters, a fact which surprised him. Maybe the tents had some kind of monster repellant on them? Either way, he ate his breakfast and headed out, turning to head slightly more north and hoping he'd estimated it right so he'd hit the coast near to Junon. While he was mostly walking in the grassland still, he started seeing or crossing the edges of dead land, so he could safely assume he was getting close to another device like the Reactor, even if it wasn't specifically one. No one had said anything about Junon having one, but it was possible, especially since he had no clear idea of what they were for yet.

On his way, he encountered a very strange, somewhat owl-ish bird which apparently was built to walk on the ground as easily as fly. It sent some kind of dark whirlwind at him which didn't do anything, and a Bolt spell didn't quite take it out. A rapier slash finished it off before it could get off the ground, showing him it was built to walk because its reaction time was far too slow for it to rely on flight—it would be more likely to kill itself by crashing with its reaction speed. That would also explain the darkness, if it was the monster the items shopkeeper had mentioned might blind him.

Finally, he reached a dead zone which was more extensive, and knowing Junon was on the far coast, he went around the base of the hill to the south side, testing his alchemy on the way. Sure enough, it didn't work, so he was in a zone as dead as the one around Fort Condor—and he hoped, ironically enough, that it meant he was near Junon. By the time he'd rounded the hill to the coast side, another monstrosity larger and more expressive than the Fort Condor one had come into view. With a derisive snort at the huge cannon barrel he could see pointing out at the ocean, he realized the city was built well above the ground and ocean level on levels of metal scaffolding, so either there would be a long stair leading up or there was an elevator. He again asked himself why there were no roads between towns.

Suddenly, a large, red, Hell-hound-like monster jumped in front of him from a higher ledge with a snarl, and on the monster's back was a man covered entirely in black armor and carrying a spiked mace. The man was large, along the lines of Major Armstrong, and the monster he rode was twice Edward's height at the shoulder. As soon as the monster had entered his field of vision, he'd come to a halt, and currently was generating a Fire spell in his left hand, which was facing away from his attacker, whole body on alert for sudden movement.

"Give me your gil and other valuables or I'll kill you and take them anyway," the rider growled at the boy. The hound-thing added a threatening growl of its own.

Smirking, the sixteen-year-old said sarcastically, "Oooo, you're so brave attacking a kid as a grown man and with a pet monster. Maybe I should learn from you, Bully-Man."

There was a pause filled with an aura of rage, then the hound launched itself at Ed. He skipped out of the way as he threw his Fire ball, but the hound only stumbled a bit from the flame attack. As it was about to attack again, he cast Quake on the ground under it to make it stumble again, and while the monster was off-balance, he shot forward to attack it with his Claws, slicing open its throat. The hound fell with a gurgling howl as the rider cursed and jumped from its back, launching an attack on the smaller man with his spiked mace raised high. Ed dodged the mace's initial blow and sent a Bolt at the rider as he drew his sword and the bandit had to take a moment to recover from having embedded the heavy mace in the ground. The first swing of the rapier clashed with the rod of the hastily raised mace, just below the mace head, but in the moment he disengaged from the mace, throwing the man off-balance, he kicked the rider in the head hard enough to knock him out.

Pausing, Ed asked in confusion, "And this is the bandit no one could beat for several months? What good's this infantry if that's the best they can do?"

At that moment, he actively realized it felt like someone was watching him, so turned to look around, especially in the direction it felt like the gaze was coming from, but couldn't see anyone.

After a pause, he sighed and searched the man, finding a yellow Materia which was called Manipulate and many bills and coins scattered around in his armor and clothes. There were three thousands, five five hundreds, fourteen hundreds, twenty-six fifties, forty-nine tens, and seventy-three coins, for a grand total of eighty-seven hundred and sixty-three gil. Honestly, he was shocked, but he took both the Materia and the gil, adding it to his own stash in his bag and wondering if there was a way to reduce it somehow—besides by spending it. The Materia went in the keepers pocket, not in his last free slot on his Armlet yet.

Done with that, he headed for the city again, but still felt like he was being watched, a thought which was confirmed when he had the urge to dodge, only to find a bullet embedded in the rock just past the place he'd been standing. Turning to look in the direction of the bullet, he again didn't see anyone, but the sense of the observation was amusement so strong he could feel it, and he had a pretty good idea of where his watcher was, anyway. Town wasn't far, so he turned to jog towards it, shifting in and out of the rocks and platforms scattered across the landscape, effectively preventing his watcher from 'testing' him again.

It took him by surprise when he reached the edge of a small town sitting in the shadow of the city above, so he took a few minutes to explore it, finding a washed-out, polluted town which was dying out. There was a path down to the beach, so he decided to check out the condition of the water—if the land was so bad, the ocean probably was as well. It wasn't a bad beach, to be honest, but with the scaffolding and city above, it certainly wasn't the kind of quality beach it once would have been. His follower was still there, so he didn't plan on spending long there, but as he was about to turn and go back to town, he saw a flash of brilliant red in the water, so waded out to it. The water was up to his knees by the time he could reach out and grab it, which nearly meant submerging in the name of retrieving the red object—which told him its name, her name, was Shiva.

As he stood in the water, staring at the red orb in his hand, he felt compelled to let it touch his bare skin, so used the skin against the back of his arm again. Rather than instructions—though it still had those—she spoke to him.

:Thank you for finding me, Sentinel. Keep me close so I may protect you.:

Notes:

(1)—I'm adding regular swords alongside the huge ones Cloud uses, as it actually doesn't make sense for any world to have only massive weapons like the Buster Sword.